RALEIGH – Greeting visitors at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library on N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus when it opens in January will be Robert the Robot and three of his automated friends.

But before conjuring up images of the Jetsons family zipping around the gleaming new building, it should be known that the library robots are actually 50-foot-tall cranes that will be the centerpiece of the Hunt Library’s book-delivery system.

Construction of the $116 million library and parking deck was officially completed on Sept. 13 – one day ahead of schedule – and the university’s library staff has started installing high-tech video boards that will be featured throughout the building, moving in furniture and getting the place ready for its Jan. 2 debut.

But work had been going on for months to prepare for the unveiling of “Robot Alley” and its $4.5 million bookBot robotic retrieval system. The system will be the first of its kind in a library in North Carolina, and will be among only about 25 American academic libraries that have installed such systems.

The bookBot cavern, which spans 145 feet wide and 60 feet long, features 50-foot-tall racks holding 18,000 steel bins that are capable of storing a total of two million books and journals. Most of the 1.5 million books being loaded into the bookBot system previously were in storage or are coming from crowded bookshelves at the university’s other libraries.

Each book in each bin is tagged electronically and densely packed according to size. When a book request is made, the library’s computer system directs the mechanical cranes to the appropriate bin for retrieval.

The retrieval process takes less than five minutes, and the bookBot takes up only one-ninth of the space required for traditional library shelving, says David Hiscoe, director of communication strategy for NCSU Libraries.

While Hiscoe concedes that the days of books in print may be numbered, many books are still only available in print because of copyright laws. Storage for large volumes of books will still be needed for at least another 100 years.

“We are at a critical hybrid stage for libraries,” he says. “While a huge amount of research is on the Internet or available digitally, books are still a very important part of research.”

Hiscoe says the idea for using the bookBot came from the realization early on in the planning process that the library wouldn’t be able to meet its seating goals for students in the size of building that could be afforded. “It came back as a great match for our needs,” he says. The Hunt Library will have nearly 100 rooms available for students for individual study or group projects.

The technology underlying the high-density, automated shelving has been used in large-scale industries such as automotive manufacturing and textiles for decades, but only in recent years have library systems started utilizing its efficiencies. The NCSU robot system was built by Dematic of Grand Rapids, Mich., which installed a similar system at the University of Chicago’s Joe and Rika Mansueto Library that opened in 2011.

The Hunt Library will also have 400,000 books available on traditional shelving. These will be the most requested or new books.

While the Hunt Library’s bookBot budget was included in the overall building construction costs funded by the North Carolina General Assembly in 2008, the library has also launched a campaign to raise $10 million to pay for advanced technology and furnishings, offering dozens of naming opportunities for donations up to $2 million.

Naming rights for three of the four bookBot robots have already been committed for $50,000 each, but only one has been formally announced: Robert the Robot, named after Dr. Robert Bashford, a professor of psychiatry, obstetrics and gynecology and the associate dean for admission at the UNC School of Medicine in Chapel Hill. Bashford is a graduate and supporter of N.C. State University, Hiscoe says.

Mark Collins, project executive for the Hunt Library’s construction contractor, Skanska, says the project was on target and on budget when his company officially handed over the keys to the building to the university last week.

The building was designed and built according to silver-level LEED certification by the U.S. Green Building Council, he says. The design firms that collaborated on the project were Oslo, Norway-based Snohetta and Raleigh design firm Pearce Brinkley Cease & Lee Architecture.

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